“Over there, those are Indian muskets, English, Confederate, and Union rifles. It looks like I’m waiting for the next uprisin’,” he says, laughing.
John grew up in London’s East End and still has the accent and sense of humor of the true Cockney that he is. As a child, he was, of all things, an engraving prodigy. When he was four years old, his father taught him copperplate writing, a style of calligraphy that is transferred by an engraver, using a pointed tool called a burin, onto a plate made of copper. The plate can then be used to make prints. At fifteen, he was accepted into London’s Central School of Arts & Crafts, one of the world’s most prestigious art institutions, even though the minimum age was eighteen. One school had turned him away because he was already a better engraver than the instructors.
“When I picked up the graver and put it into copper, I knew that this was what I wanted to do,” he says.
John happens to be a descendant, on his mother’s side, of William Hogarth, the eighteenth-century engraver and painter, whose best-known work is A Rake’s Progress, a series of images depicting the boozy downfall of a rich young man who comes to the city. “Maybe that’s where the obsession comes from.”
John’s lettering had a balletic flow, and his images were complex, precise, and assured, astonishing in one so young. He was recruited out of art school for a five-year apprenticeship at William Day Limited, a famed copperplate engraver specializing in high-end stationary and naval charts. It would be the last hand-engraving apprenticeship ever offered in the U.K.
“It was quite Dickensian,” John says of the firm where he did his training. “My guv’nor had a Sherlock Holmes pipe. I remember one day hearing him completely dismissing offset litho printing, saying it was a ‘toy,’ that it would never take off. And, really, it pretty much killed off the copperplate industry.”
Copperplate engraving produces print images of exquisite sharpness, but because the plates wear down with each strike they have a short life-span. The offset press removed the direct contact between plate and paper by the addition of a rubber surface, allowing for a large number of prints, albeit of lesser quality than copperplate, to be produced rapidly and at a more affordable price. As the use of offset lithography became more widespread, copperplate engraving became increasingly niche.
“The biggest customer in them days was the royal family,” John says of his time working in London. “I did the invites for Princess Diana’s wedding.”
He was also commissioned to craft a gold signet ring with the Welsh three-ostrich-plume crest for Prince Charles’s investiture as the Prince of Wales—a ring he still wears on his pinkie.
John moved to Australia in 1983 and, after a short stint in book publishing, started his own jewelry business. He uses engraving methods and tools identical to those used in the fourteenth century, when the craft was first developed to provide ornamentation on suits of armor. With the burin’s rounded wooden knob handle resting in the palm of his hand, John pushes the sharp steel tip into precious metal to make a groove, like a plow furrowing a field. The pressure must be exactly right.
“You can always tell an engraver,” he says, holding up his right hand and showing me his middle finger, which is permanently twisted from applying force for the past forty-eight years.
Though engraving appears to be a sedentary pursuit, John says it is a physical and mental workout.
“You really use every muscle in your body. And it’s also a bit like yoga. You have to control your breathing.”
John takes projects home every night, and works on them until 2 a.m. He is usually up by 6 a.m. to make the hour-long commute back into Sydney. Some nights he loses track of time and looks up and realizes that the sun is coming up.
“I always strive for a hundred and ten percent,” he says. “I’m never satisfied. That’s how passionate I am about it. I eat, drink, and sleep it. I think that’s the mark of a true artist. I don’t mean to sound conceited.”
John’s wife is resigned to his long hours. She does not allow him, however, to tell people he is an engraver when they are on vacation, knowing that he will start talking about his work and will be unable to stop.
“She says I have to say I’m a metal worker,” he tells me with a laugh.
When John W. Thompson & Son launched several websites, inquiries and orders began coming in. Signet rings were not, it turned out, in demand only among the tallyho set. He is often asked to engrave words in Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese—none of which he speaks.
“I have got an idea about Latin,” he says.
On his left hand, he wears a gold ring on which he carved the words Cave Furorem Patientis—“Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.”
“There is so much access now. I’m doing five, six, ten jobs at once,” he says. “I’m getting overwhelmed. And emails—that’s a different kind of hell. People expect me to answer them.
“I’m my own worst enemy, though. I talk too much. I’m always talking to customers who come in. I want them to feel welcome. But I don’t like the tire-kickers, the people who want to pick your brain, and then they go home and get on their computers. Or they say, ‘Why are you charging so much when I get it done at Mr. Minit?’ They don’t know how much work is involved.”
I think about my own recent brushes with metal engraving: an iPod with my initials on it, and dozens of small personalized trophies for my daughter’s ski team. Both purchases had arrived at my front door with stupefying speed after I ordered them online.
John is so skilled with the burin that he can carve sixty letters on a ring measuring only one centimeter across. Just for fun, he once engraved a tiny copper plate with the words “Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,” then used it to print his holiday greeting cards. Though John may not be competitive—“I’ve got past all that. I don’t feel I have to prove myself”—hand engravers do have a long tradition of trying to top one another.
The challenge has always been to fit the most words on the smallest surface. In the late 1800s, that might have meant carving the Lord’s Prayer on the back of a dollar gold piece. In 1899, a Canadian goldsmith named Samuel Dibbs gained notoriety when he engraved that prayer, plus the Ten Commandments, his name and address, and the words “There are 1,593 letters engraved on this coin” on a five-cent piece. Two years later, the Lord Provost of Perth managed to get the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, Numbers 6:24–26, and the Doxology on a three-penny piece. In 1904, Clarence Young, a U.S. government engraver, fit two full alphabets, the date, and his name on the head of a pin. Then, in 1907, Paul Wentz, a Pennsylvanian, squeezed the Lord’s Prayer onto the head of a brass pin with a 2-mm diameter.
That inspired a Seattle jewelry engraver named Godfrey Lundberg to attempt to go one better. His goal was to fit the Lord’s Prayer on a pinhead one-third the size of Wentz’s. Before he could begin, however, Lundberg knew that he had to undergo serious physical and mental training.
“The steadiness of nerve that would be required could come only as the result of a conditioning process stricter than that of the highly trained athlete,” the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported. “Tobacco, coffee and like indulgences were out of the question. Fresh air and exercise were necessary. Complete rest for the eyes had to be assured.”
As he prepared himself physically, Lundberg also spent six months making an engraving tool of specially tempered steel that could carve microscopic lines but still hold up to the pressure of the engraver’s strokes. The point was invisible to the naked eye. Once he had the tool—and the resting heart rate—he worked on the pin only in the evenings, when the rumbling trolley cars that passed by his shop had stopped running for the day. With his arms strapped to an iron bar and his wrists bound with leather straps to muffle the rhythm of his pulse, he completed only two or three strokes a day. After starting over hundreds of times, he finally completed one perfect pin. It had taken him three years—and what was calculated to be 1,863 individual strokes.
The wor
k created a sensation when it went on exhibit at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. People lined up to pay twenty-five cents for the chance to peer through a microscope at the pin. When that closed, the Lundberg Pin toured the country for two years. Lundberg, meanwhile, had no time to bask in the glory of his feat. He had a nervous breakdown shortly after completing the pin.
“He did recover after about six months of total rest,” Jim Austin, his great-grandnephew, told me in an email. The Lundberg Pin, Jim says, is in a safety-deposit box near Seattle.
Nearly a hundred years after Godfrey Lundberg completed his pin, a Birmingham, England, engraver named Graham Short got interested in taking up the Lord’s Prayer challenge. The engraver, who was also a champion swimmer with a resting pulse of thirty, wore a stethoscope, and stroked the nineteenth-century needle he was using as a burin only between heartbeats. After successfully completing the pin, he went on to two other unparalleled feats. He fit a chapter from the Koran, in Arabic, on the head of a pin, and the phrase “Nothing Is Impossible” on the barely-there cutting edge of a razor blade.
Becoming accomplished at the most basic hand engraving can take years. More complicated and intricate designs take decades to master. Peter Thompson has been working with his father for thirteen years and still sticks primarily to engraving wedding bands.
“When I started, it took me five days to do one,” Peter tells me. “Now I’ve got it down to maybe five to eight hours. I’m still not up to signet rings.”
By the time Peter takes over the business from his father, which he plans to do, he expects to have signet rings in his repertoire as well. Eventually, a third generation may also join the family trade.
“I have a grandson who is sixteen and he’s interested in working here,” John says. “But I told him, ‘Don’t just do it because you know you could have a job.’ If you haven’t got the commitment or the passion for it, it will honestly break your heart.”
The canvases, which would create inner structure, had been soaked in water, hung to dry, and then pressed smooth. The same had been done to the pocketing fabric and cotton elements. John had used plenty of steam. It was crucial to get any shrinkage out at the beginning of the process. Now it was time for the making. Here the tailor handed off the work to his two trusted lieutenants in the workroom, Genaro Scura and Leng Ngo.
Leng would handle the interior work: three layers of woolen canvas, horsehair, and cotton would be held together with tiny stitches, laid out in a herringbone pattern. These touches, found “under the hood” of a garment if one knew where to look, are the hallmarks of true bespoke. Mass-produced coats and jackets have glued canvases that can come apart at the dry cleaners—and tend to give the garment a flat appearance. J. H. Cutler garments are three-dimensional: sculptures rendered in cloth.
When the coat was ready for a first fitting, John called Keith and asked him to come by. John and Genaro looked on as Keith slipped the coat on over his suit jacket and turned around to look in the mirror. It was always special, that first moment the client saw himself in the new garment—the dream, Cutler liked to say, made real.
Keith loved the coat. Now it was a matter of getting the details right. They all agreed that it was a little long, so John took one and a half inches off the length. That would make it more pleasing to the eye, and also make it a bit more casual. He also decided to reduce the overlap on the front edge by half an inch. The coat was slightly more voluminous than Keith wanted it to be. No worries, John had told Keith. He would reduce the fullness at the hips.
After the fitting was done, Keith lingered in the shop. John’s clients often did. He knew they liked the way they felt there. Safe, special, satisfied. Why not have a spot of something, eh? It was time for a little celebration.
A smack of all Human Life lies in the Tailor; its wild struggles towards beauty, dignity, freedom, victory.
THOMAS CARLYLE
In a paneled private dining room above the dark cabbage palms and gum trees of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, I am fighting the urge to say, “Boxers or briefs?” A silver-haired doctor with a patrician James Mason-y voice and a knack for speaking in long, grammatically gymnastic sentences has just told me that he wears cashmere underwear.
“Bespoke,” he adds, with a slight tip of his head, as if that point was very nearly moot. “Of course, it has to have a percentage of nylon to be effective.”
“Hmm,” I say, nodding and reaching for my champagne glass.
John Cutler is hosting a dinner party for nine friends, all of whom also happen to be longtime customers of his tailoring business. He has dressed for the occasion in a grape-soda-hued mohair-and-wool suit edged with clementine-orange stitching—the color of which just matches the single-breasted jacket’s silk lining. His necktie, a shimmery amethyst exclamation point, is nubbed, mid-chest, by a pearl stickpin and set off by a pressed white shirt. Along the top edge of his jacket’s breast pocket, a folded handkerchief appears as a flat half-inch bar of white. On his feet are narrow lace-up shoes of black calf and purple suede, custom-made by his friend Stefano Bemer in Florence.
We are on the second floor of the Australian Club, Sydney’s oldest and most exclusive gentlemen’s retreat. Membership is by invitation only, and must be supported by no fewer than eight current members. That John was nominated and accepted ten years ago is a testament to his genial personality, his personal connections, and the elevation of his profession in the eyes of the city’s élite from lowly tradesman to esteemed artisan.
“I’ve even been asked to be on the wine committee,” he told me later. “My forebears would be very surprised.”
Women may socialize here in the company of a member, but they are not allowed to join the club. (They are also required to take the elevator to the upper floors—a fact that was pointed out with obvious alarm by the lobby attendant, who halted me as I started up the stairs.) John’s guests have moved from the outer lounge area, where cocktails were served, to a long table set with place cards, white linen, silver candelabras, and heavy cutlery. Most of the men appear to be in their sixties. Some are paunchy, some slim; all are freshly shaved and all are wearing dark suits made for them by John Cutler. The discussion, as we were being seated, had been about champagne—and the relative merits of non-vintage versus vintage (my vote, if I had been asked, would have been yes to both). Now the conversation has turned to their collective passion for bespoke—and their devotion to J. H. Cutler.
“I identified myself long ago as someone for whom the comfort zone was essential to maintain,” says Philip Knowles, the cashmere-undie-wearing general practitioner seated next to me. “I was greatly threatened by anything that threatened my sense of personal comfort, right down to on my skin. What John excels in is realizing a dream of remarkable personal comfort which is exquisite in its detail, quality, and refinement—and is something about which only you know.”
“And, once you are hooked, you are hooked for life,” says David Skillman, a trim marketing executive in a red silk tie, seated across from me. “In my case, strange as it may seem, when I first went to work I was amazingly shy. I used to walk by John’s father’s shop on Bligh Street and look in the window. One day in 1969, I actually walked in. John and I hit it off right away. He made me my first suit—mid-gray mohair and wool. And, after I walked out into the world in my carefully crafted coat of armor, I was invincible. I was Superman. I felt so confident because I knew I had the absolute best, and I could look any other man in this town dead in the eye and say, ‘I’m as good as you.’ ”
“Absolutely.” “Quite right,” the men huff.
“It’s about knowing that you look the best person on the street, that you are wearing something that no one else is wearing, that no one else understands—and you’re it,” says Tony Wain, a Melbourne-based fabric supplier and the sales agent for Stefano Ricci. “I picked up three pairs of trousers from John today, and I know that when I wear those I’m going to feel absolutely fantastic. It’s ju
st so good to know you have something new and something special that is going to fit you and look good and make you feel well.”
“That’s exactly right—and that shouldn’t be underestimated,” Philip says, “because the sense of negativity in which you can engage every day, whether as a small businessman or a medical practitioner, is such that it can overwhelm you gradually from one year to the next, let alone one day to the next.
“Yesterday, for example, I had a nineteen-year-old boy stab his girlfriend in the waiting room. And another person had a heart attack in the waiting room, and yet a third fractured her femur whilst coming up the stairs to the waiting room. These sorts of things happen about once every eight or nine working days. To survive the traumas of practicing medicine, I rely on many arrows in my quiver, and one of the most important arrow for me is this sense of personal comfort … and knowing I have around me this little cocoon of Cutlerian elegance and comfort. It allows me to distance myself.”
“I can relate so much,” says Craig Dyer, the youngest man in the group. Craig is a fit-looking, hyper-groomed forty-something radiologist and champagne bar owner who resembles a less intense Anthony Perkins. “To be able to express yourself and immerse yourself in the joy of [wearing bespoke clothes] … it’s like art. Going into John’s shop is like going into an art gallery. You feel enlightened and enlivened. It helps all the misery you experience during the day go away. It’s a bit like my penchant for champagne. If I didn’t have a little ray of sunshine at the end of the day, there would be no point in me working—no point in me living—because the stress we undergo is enormous.”
“Yes.” “So true.”
“All of my jackets and trousers are John’s,” Craig continues. “I threw everything else away because they didn’t fit right. And I have to say that every time—every single time—I walk out the door, someone comes up to me and says, ‘You look very good.’ Just tonight, I was waiting for a taxi, and a woman said, ‘Love your jacket and trousers,’ and just kept walking. When I was in Paris, three complete strangers in the space of a few hours came up to me and said, ‘That suit you’re wearing is fantastic.’ It almost gets embarrassing.”
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